1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to cotton harvesting and compacting implements and, more specifically, to a method and apparatus for densification of seed cotton for transport.
2. Related Art
Cotton harvesting operations typically utilize cotton module builders or boll buggies which receive cotton from the picker or stripper basket. Module builders often have a very slow, power consuming module building cycle and require an expensive cotton harvester to sit idle while waiting to offload to the module builder or buggy. A conventional four row cotton picker may require support of at least one module builder, two boll buggies and two tractors. Increasing the size of the picker to six rows requires at least one additional builder and boll buggy, resulting in substantially increased support equipment costs and field management problems from traffic jams in the head row. The cotton harvester basket can be enlarged, but added basket capacity only postpones without resolving the loss of productivity and traffic problems caused by capacity mismatches between the harvester and the supporting cotton handling devices. Offloading and preparing harvested cotton for transport actually becomes the key problem limiting productivity in the field.
Slowness and excessive power requirements of conventional compacting devices result primarily from the inherent inefficiency of compressive action typical of most devices. Each layer of cotton moved to the builder is compressed on top of previous layers of cotton of low spring rate so much of the stroke of the compressing device is absorbed by the previous layers. This inherent inefficiency not only results in slow and inefficient operation, but also causes considerable variation in the density of the resulting cotton module and minimizes the transport and handling integrity of the module. The top layers of conventional modules are virtually uncompressed and easily unsettled during handling for transport.